Week 35: Freaks and Leaks

Hello, Week 35. I remember you. You are the week when I have to start tying the wife’s shoes because she can’t bend over…

By Jeff Ruby

Published June 8, 2012

Hello, Week 35. I remember you.

You are the week when I have to start tying the wife’s shoes because she can’t bend over. The week that she shares her humiliating biological woes on Facebook (“Itchy, itchy armpits”) without a shred of embarrassment. The week that she starts chewing ice—Jesus,again with the ice?—so often and with such gusto that she chips another tooth. The week the dog starts randomly howling at the wife’s stomach because she believes there’s some kind of toy in there. And the dog is right. It’s a weird five-pound toy that doesn’t do anything other than get periodic hiccups and look satanic on 3-D ultrasounds.

During Week 35, when the wife rolls over in bed, the earth rumbles and tectonic plates don’t just shift, they shit in their tectonic pants, and it reminds me of this. And I go right ahead and tell her so, because nothing I say can be half as humiliating as the fact that she’s currently resting her belly on the sink while brushing her teeth.

You are the week in which a doctor, who seemed like a perfectly rational person before, takes some kind of skewer-looking thing that probably ought to have a kebab on it, and inserts it into various unholy areas of the wife to check for bacteria called Group B streptococci. And it’s right about now that the wife’s uterus pushes so far north it tickles her rib cage. Note: It doesn’t really tickle, Week 35. I was joking. But you should know that. Because you are a sick twist, or rather you must be, because that’s the only way to explain why you felt the need to take an organ that’s normally the size of a pear and blow it up to roughly the size of Bolivia, overtaking other essential internal organs like Brazil, Peru, and Argentina. To say nothing of Paraguay.

Oh, and that was pretty hilarious, Week 35, when you decided to swell the wife’s left leg to twice the size of her right, just to make it look like some kind of crazy blood clot. You must have laughed when she got that emergency ultrasound, and laughed even harder when the technician told her: No blood clot—the Incredible Ballooning Leg is just one of those weird week 35 oddities.

Or there was the party to which you sent not one, but two OB/GYNs, both of whom took a look at the wife’s rotundness and gave yours truly a quick tutorial for delivering the baby. (Both thumbs on the left, guide the anterior shoulder down, then the posterior shoulder up. And don’t forget the placenta.)

What’s that? I’m supposed to pull out of the umbilical cord by yanking on it like a loose shirt thread on my shirt? Oh, Week 35, you joker, you!

The heartburn, the constant and overwhelming need for urination that produces nothing but a trickle, the museum of half-drank glasses of water in my apartment: All curated by you with your savvy eye for mortifying gastrointestinal distress. I bet this is your favorite movie. Isn’t it?

Week 35. You are a freakshow. If Trump’s hair had sex with Flavor Flav’s teeth in Octomom’s bed while Rihanna recorded it on her iPhone, the video would look like Week 35. Good riddance to you. Please send me Week 36 ASAP, and if you see Week 14 around the water cooler, say hello for me. I miss that guy.